When A Kiss Is Not Just A Kiss

When a kiss is not just a kiss. Edith Shain is dead at 91. Long live Edith Shain.Somehow it slipped under my media radar that Edith Shain had died early last week.  She was 91.

Shain was the nurse who was seized and kissed by a sailor in Times Square on V-J Day in 1945.  Alfred Eisenstaedt snapped a picture, and it captured something so uniquely American that we haven't been able to leave it alone for sixty-five years.

The thing has been analyzed to death.  But if it can stand one more assault, I'm struck (as I have been unconsciously since I was a kid) by the relationships between the accidental passion of the kiss and the bystanders.  Some look on, half-enviously and half-ironically: some walk past, aware of this moment of happiness erupting near them, but determinedly minding their own business.

And the emtion of the kiss itself is relentlessly casual, a spectacle of desire set in a context of mild indifference, tolerance, even approval... anything but shame.

It's uniquely American: the happiness of individuals in a single moment given an iconic status. 

It's reality television with all its casual spontanaity and its life-as-spectator-sport nonchalance, except that it's more real and it's eternal.

I don't think we know for sure who the sailor is.  But Edith Shain remains a still unravished bride, suspended in time forever as an icon of American desire, not ignoring the eyes on her but winking back at them with a resolute intention to take this kiss because this moment is sanctified by happiness, an instant of high drama if she can just submit to its sudden, surprising kiss.

Comments

[Michelle]

This picture makes me sigh every time....